I am trying to setup the slime mode in emacs for using common lisp. When I attemp to start slime with M-x slime I get an error message saying:

process inferior-lisp not running.

So, I checked the value of the variable inferior-lisp-program which turned out to be "/opt/sbcl/bin/sbcl". sbcl is an acronym for an implementation of common lisp known as steel bank common lisp. Note that this variable is defined in file slime.el. As I do not have sbcl (the previous directory does not even exist on my machine) installed on my machine (which runs os x 10.8.3) this will not work.

I have the clisp implementation which is located in the directory: /opt/local/bin/. I tried to change the value of the variable inferior-lisp-program by:

(setq inferior-lisp-program '/opt/local/bin/clisp/)

However, this did not work and I do not know what else to try.

How can I get inferior-lisp to run and hence get slime to work?

EDIT: Here is some extra information I believe that could be helpful. If I try to just start common lisp in emacs by executing M-x run-lisp I get the following output from emacs:

I don't use SLIME myself, so I'm sure someone else will have a better answer, but I would suggest using M-x apropos-value RET /opt/sbcl/bin/sbcl RET to try to find out where that value came from originally (and hence which variable needs configuring).
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philsJun 10 '13 at 5:28

In fact you can probably give it the quoted value "/opt/sbcl/bin/sbcl" for a more precise match, should there be a lot of hits for the unquoted version.
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philsJun 10 '13 at 5:35

@phils could you explain how to "give it the quoted value"? I am not entirely familiar with emacs yet. I have grasped a lot of basics necessary to become more efficient though :)
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CodeKingPlusPlusJun 10 '13 at 11:34

2

I suspect the following will not work: (setq inferior-lisp-program '/opt/local/bin/clisp/) because you are setting the variable to a symbol when it should be a string. Try (setq inferior-lisp-program "/opt/local/bin/clisp/"), or do M-x customize-variable RET inferior-lisp-program RET.
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Jon O.Jun 10 '13 at 12:28